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The Roman geographical area of
Armorica.

The
Seine and Loire are marked in red.

Armorica or
Aremorica is the name given in ancient times to
the part of Gaul that includes the Brittanypeninsula and the territory between the Seine and Loire rivers, extending inland to an indeterminate point
and down the Atlantic coast. The toponym is based on the Gaulish phrase
are-mori "on/at [the] sea", made into the Gaulish place
name Aremorica (*are-mor-ika ) 'Place by the
Sea'. The suffix -ika was first used to create adjectival forms and then, names (See
regions as Pays d'OucheUtica,
PerchePertica ). The original
designation was vague, including a large part of what became
Normandy in the 10th century and, in some
interpretations, the whole of the coast down to the Pyrenees.
Later, the term became restricted to Brittany.

In Breton (which with Welsh and Cornish belongs to the Brythonic branch of Insular Celtic languages), 'on
[the] sea' is war vor (Welsh ar for), though the
older form arvor is used to refer to the coastal regions
of Brittany, in contrast to argoad (ar 'on/at', coad
'forest' [Welsh ar goed ('coed' forest)] for the inland
regions. These cognate modern usages suggest that the Romans first
contacted coastal people in the inland region and assumed that the
regional name Aremorica referred to the whole area, both
coastal and inland.

Trade between Armorica and Britain, described by Diodorus Siculus and implied by Pliny was
long-established. Because, even after the campaign of Publius Crassus
in 57 BC, continued resistance to Roman rule in Armorica was still
being supported by Celtic aristocrats in Britain, Julius
Caesar led two invasions of Britain in 55 and 54 in response.
Some hint
of the complicated cultural web that bound Armorica and the
Britanniae (the "Britains" of Pliny) is given by Caesar when he
describes Diviciacus of the
Suessiones, as "the most powerful ruler
in the whole of Gaul, who had control not only over a large area of
this region but also of Britain" Archaeological sites along the
south coast of England, notably at Hengistbury Head, show connections with Armorica as far east as the
Solent. This 'prehistoric' connection of Cornwall
and Brittany set the stage for the link that continued into the
medieval era. Still farther East, however, the typical Continental
connections of the Britannic coast were with the lower Seine valley
instead.

Archeology has not yet been as enlightening in Iron-Age Armorica as
the coinage, which has been surveyed by Philip de Jersey.

Under the
Roman Empire, Armorica was administered
as part of the province of Gallia
Lugdunensis, which had its capital in Lugdunum, (modern day
Lyons). When the Roman
provinces were reorganized in the 4th century, Armorica
(Tractus
Armoricanus et Nervicanus) was placed under the second and
third divisions of Lugdunensis. After the legions retreated from
Britannia (407) the local elite there expelled the civilian
magistrates in the following year; Armorica too rebelled in the
430s and again in the 440s, throwing out the ruling officials, as
the Romano-Britons had done. At the Battle of the Catalaunian
Plains in 451 a Roman coalition led by General Flavius Aetius and the Visigothic King
Theodoric I clashed violently with the
Hunnic alliance commanded by King Attila
the Hun. Jordanes lists Aëtius' allies
as including Armoricans and other Celtic or German tribes (Getica
36.191).

The "Armorican" peninsula came to be settled with Britons from Britain during the poorly
documented period of the 5th-7th centuries. These settlers,
whether refugees or not, made their presence felt in the naming of
the westernmost, Atlantic-facing provinces of Armorica, Cornouaille ("Cornwall") and Domnonea
("Devon").
These settlements are associated with leaders like Saints Samson of Dol and Pol
Aurelian, among the "founder saints" of Brittany.

Questions of the relations between the Celtic cultures of Britain—
Cornish and Welsh— and Celtic Breton are far from settled. Martin Henig
(2003) suggests that in Armorica as in sub-Roman Britain, "there was a fair
amount of creation of identity in the migration period. We know that the mixed,
but largely British and Frankish population of Kent repackaged
themselves as 'Jutes', and the largely British
populations in the lands east of Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall) seem
to have ended up as 'West Saxons'. In western Armorica the small
elite which managed to impose an identity on the population
happened to be British rather than 'Gallo-Roman' in origin, so they
became Bretons. The process may have been essentially the same."
According to C.E.V. Nixon, the collapse of Roman power and the
depredations of the Visigoths led Armorica
to act "like a magnet to peasants, coloni, slaves and the
hard-pressed" who deserted other Roman territories, further
weakening them. This flux of shifting self-identification in the
Early Middle Ages, characterizes the modern view, which is
supplementing traditional assertions of continuity from the Iron
Age.

When
Vikings or Northmen
settled in the Cotentin peninsula and the lower Seine around Rouen in the ninth
and early tenth centuries, and these regions came to be known as
Normandy, the name
Armorica fell out of use in the area. With western
Armorica having already evolved into Brittany, the east was recast from a Frankish
viewpoint as the Breton March under a Frankish marquis.

Armorica popularized in contemporary culture

The home village of the fictional comic-book hero Asterix was located in Armorica during the Roman Empire; there, "indomitable Gauls" hold
out against Rome. The unnamed village was reported as having been
discovered by archaeologists in a spoof article in the British
The Independent newspaper on April Fool's Day,
1993.North Armorica is mentioned in the first sentence of
James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.

Footnotes

The Irish form is 'ar mhuir', the Manx is 'er vooir', and the
Scottish form 'air mhuir'. However, in these languages the phrase
means 'on the sea', as opposed to 'ar thír' or 'ar thalamh/ar
thalúin (er heer/er haloo, air thìr/air thalamh) 'on the
land'.